Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast Lets You Eavesdrop on the A.I. Elite

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Artificial IntelligenceOpenAI’s New A.I. ModelAnthropic’s ModelA.I. Arms RaceAnthropic-White House TalksJob Cuts on Wall StreetYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.Dwarkesh Patel in his office and studio in San Francisco. “He’s very much in the community, in the inner ring,” one tech executive said. Credit...Aaron Wojack for The New York TimesThe Podcast Where You Can Eavesdrop on the A.I. EliteDwarkesh Patel was a bored college sophomore looking for intellectual stimulation. Now he commands interviews with Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg and holds his own with deeply nerdy A.I. researchers.Dwarkesh Patel in his office and studio in San Francisco. “He’s very much in the community, in the inner ring,” one tech executive said. Credit...Aaron Wojack for The New York TimesSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTListen · 20:00 min Share full article30By Benjamin WallaceApril 26, 2026Updated 7:55 a.m. ETAs Dwarkesh Patel entered a small sushi restaurant in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood on a recent Monday evening, a ripple of excitement passed among four young men sitting together near the door. Before Mr. Patel, a 25-year-old podcaster with a weightlifting-enhanced physique and a dense beard that friends call “majestic,” could approach the hostess, two of the men asked him for selfies. He obliged, then stepped outside to wait for a table. I asked whether this happened a lot. “I feel like it’s gotten especially intense in the last few months,” he said.Though Mr. Patel is largely unknown to tech outsiders, the “Dwarkesh Podcast” averages two million listens per episode, and within the bubble of A.I. builders, backers and worriers, it is mandatory listening. The busiest chief executives (Satya Nadella, Mark Zuckerberg) and most influential A.I. researchers (Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy) sit with him for interviews that often exceed two hours. Tyler Cowen, the economist and public intellectual, describes Mr. Patel as “the No. 1 chronicler of the A.I. era; no one comes close to him in that way.”Mr. Patel has achieved this distinction by immersing himself in the artificial intelligence community and speaking its language. An episode that included, without pausing for definitions, the terms “quadratic attention costs,” “KV vectors,” and “nines of reliability” went viral in A.I. circles. Mr. Patel told me his aim is to dig into the debates at the frontier of A.I. development. “And those things are just lost if you are, in the moment, trying to translate for other people.”Mr. Patel’s affable aura of authority derives, too, if not from his plain-vanilla undergraduate computer science degree, then from his milieu of friends, roommates and group-chatmates who include researchers at A.I. labs, investors and A.I.-adjacent thinkers. It’s all quite cozy. Mr. Patel’s assistant is the brother of Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s chief of staff, who is in turn the fiancée of Leopold Aschenbrenner, Mr. Patel’s friend and former podcast guest from whose multibillion-dollar A.I.-focused investment fund, Situational Awareness, Mr. Patel sublets office space. Sholto Douglas, a researcher at Anthropic who is one of Mr. Patel’s roommates and a repeat guest on his podcast, recently competed with Mr. Patel in a “chestmaxxing” showdown on a YouTube show called “Swole as a Service” (where standing…

This excerpt is published under fair use for community discussion. Read the full article at NYT > Top Stories.